NEW REPORT REVEALS WIDESPREAD DECLINE IN WORLD'S ECOSYSTEMS

News Release issued jointly by the United Nations Environment Programme,
United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank and the World
Resources
Institute

NAIROBI, April 18, 2000 --- Summary findings of a new report issued
yesterday in Washington D.C. reveal a widespread decline in the condition
of
the world's ecosystems due to increasing resource demands and warn that if
the decline continues it could have devastating implications for human
development and the welfare of all species.

"Many signs point to the declining capacity of ecosystems," says the Guide
to the World Resources 2000-2001: People and Ecosystems: The Fraying Web
of
Life. The full report, to be released in September, is published by the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Environment Programme
(UNEP), the World Bank and the World Resources Institute (WRI). Over 175
scientists contributed to the report, which took more than two years to
produce.

Ecosystems are communities of interacting organisms and the physical
environment in which they live; they are the biological engines of the
planet. At the heart of the report is the first-of-its- kind Pilot
Analysis
of Global Ecosystems (PAGE). The report examines coastal, forest,
grassland,
freshwater and agricultural ecosystems.

It analyzes their health on the basis of their ability to produce the
goods
and services that the world currently relies on. These include production
of
food, provision of pure and sufficient water, storage of atmospheric
carbon,
maintenance of biodiversity and provision of recreation and tourism
opportunities.

The scorecards that accompany the World Resources 2000- 2001 describe most
of the ecosystems in fair, but declining conditions. The statistics it
contains are staggering:

Half of the world's wetlands were lost last century.

Logging and conversion have shrunk the world's forests by as much as
half.

Some 9 percent of the world's tree species are at risk of extinction;
tropical deforestation may exceed 130,000 square kilometers per year.

Fishing fleets are 40 percent larger than the ocean can sustain.

Nearly 70 percent of the world's major marine fish stocks are overfished
or are being fished at their biological limit.

Soil degradation has affected two-thirds of the world's agricultural
lands
in the last 50 years.

Some 30 percent of the world's original forests have been converted to
agriculture.

Since 1980, the global economy has tripled in size and population has
grown by 30 percent to 6 billion people.

Dams, diversions or canals fragment almost 60 percent of the world's
largest rivers.

Twenty percent of the world's freshwater fish are extinct, threatened or
endangered.

"For too long in both rich and poor nations, development priorities have
focused on how much humanity can take from our ecosystems, with little
attention to the impact of our actions, " said Mark Malloch Brown, UNDP
administrator. "With this report, we reconfirm our commitment to making
the
viability of the world's ecosystems a critical development priority for
the
21st century."

However, World Resources 2000-2001 warns that halting the decline of the
planet's life-support systems may be the most difficult challenge humanity
has ever faced.

"Our knowledge of ecosystems has increased dramatically, but it has simply
not kept pace with our ability to alter them," said Klaus Toepfer, UNEP
executive director. "We can continue blindly altering Earth's ecosystems,
or
we can learn to use them more sustainably."

World Resources 2000-2001 recommends that governments and people must view
the sustainability of ecosystems as essential to human life. It calls for
an
ecosystems approach to managing the world's critical resources, which
means
evaluating decisions on land and resource use in light of how they affect
the capacity of ecosystems to produce goods and services.

"Governments and businesses must rethink some basic assumptions about how
we
measure and plan economic growth," said James D. Wolfensohn, World Bank
president. "The poor, who often depend directly on ecosystems for their
livelihoods, suffer most when ecosystems are degraded."

According to World Resources 2000-2001, one of the most important
conclusions of PAGE is that there is a lack of much of the baseline
knowledge that is needed to properly determine ecosystems conditions on a
global, regional or even local scale.

"The dimensions of this information gap are large and growing, rather than
shrinking as we would expect in this age of satellite imaging and the
Internet," said Jonathan Lash, WRI president. "If we are to make sound
ecosystem management decisions in the 21st century, dramatic changes are
needed in the way we use the knowledge and experience at hand and the
range
of additional information we need."

The PAGE report has provided the impetus for the Millennium Ecosystems
Assessment - a plan put forward by governments, UN agencies, and leading
scientific organizations to allow an on-going monitoring and evaluation of
the health of the world's ecosystems.

Copies of A Guide to World Resources 2000-2001: People and Ecosystems: The
Fraying Web of Life can be downloaded at http://www.wri.org/wri/wrr2000.
The full report will be available in September.